February 11, 2013 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITIís Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.

NoveList, a division of EBSCO Publishing, is introducing a new feature to NoveList Select, its catalog enrichment resource. The new feature adds e-resource recommendations to NoveList Select.The recommendations guide patrons to relevant e-resources—that may have been hidden or hard to find—directly from catalog records. This new feature will benefit libraries looking to make patrons more aware of the wealth of electronic resources available through the library.

Available free with a NoveList Select subscription, e-resource recommendations are comprehensive and vendor-neutral so libraries can promote a variety of resources. To ensure that patrons see a list of highly relevant resources specifically tailored to their searches, professionals at NoveList developed the recommendation strategies based on subject headings and also by the reading level of the record. Additional e-resources will be continually added to the list.

Libraries identify which e-resources they have and would like to promote from a pre-defined list. Subject headings in the e-resources are then matched with subject headings in the catalog records. This process enables patrons to see a list of highly relevant recommended e-resources when they view a record in the catalog. A list of available e-resources is available here.

In related news, NoveList Select enhanced content has been added to the Koha Open Source ILS—through a partnership of ByWater Solutions, EBSCO’s NoveList, and the Los Gatos Library, in Los Gatos, Calif. This enhanced content adds reviews from Goodreads, up-to-date series information, similar titles, and authors, as well as links to NextReads newsletters and more. Because of this integration this content is available right in a library catalog and is available to any NoveList Select customer using the Koha integrated library system.

Duncan Smith, vice president of NoveList, said, “Thanks to the efforts of ByWater Solutions, libraries that choose Koha as their catalog solution can now easily integrate the rich content from NoveList Select into their online catalog and put expert reading recommendations and other expanded content into the place where it is most visible to library patrons. This is a great example of how libraries and their readers benefit when companies work together to support library success.”

“As the U.S. and Australian ISBN agencies, we’re often the first stop for self-publishers. Since ebooks are increasingly a ‘must-have’ for our customers, we know providing them instant access to a quality conversion service streamlines the publishing process,” said Beat Barblan, director of Bowker Identifier Services. “Bowker has been a trusted partner to publishers for more than 140 years. We searched for a reliable service that would enable our customers to retain ownership of their content and consistently produce an accurate, highly useable ebook. We’re pleased to be working with DCL.”

A study by Bowker Market Research shows dramatic growth of the self-publishing market. The number of self-published books produced annually in the U.S. has nearly tripled, growing 287% since 2006, tallying more than 235,000 print and etitles as of the end of 2011. While print accounts for 63% of self-published books, ebooks are gaining fast. Ebook production in 2011 was 87,201, up 129% over 2010. In contrast, print grew 33% in the same period.

DCL’s EPUB on Demand is an online submission portal that allows authors, publishers, and other users to benefit from the same powerful resources dedicated to larger clients and organizations while streamlining the process. It’s quick, accurate, cost-effective, and supports all popular e-reader devices.

Bowker, a ProQuest affiliate, is the official ISBN Agency for the U.S. and its territories.

Source: Bowker

U.S. Government Printing Office Joins Pinterest

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) expanded its social media presence by joining Pinterest. Connecting people through "things" they find interesting is the founding principle of Pinterest and a natural fit with GPO’s core mission of Keeping America Informed on the three branches of the federal government. GPO will use Pinterest to share historic photos, videos, products, and government publications with the public. Pinterest joins GPO’s other social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Government Book Talk blog.

GPO is the federal government’s official, digital, secure resource for producing, procuring, cataloging, indexing, authenticating, disseminating, and preserving the official information products of the U.S. Government. The GPO is responsible for the production and distribution of information products and services for all three branches of the federal government, including U.S. passports for the Department of State as well as the official publications of Congress, the White House, and other federal agencies in digital and print formats. GPO provides for permanent public access to federal government information at no charge through our Federal Digital System (FDsys), partnerships with about 1,200 libraries nationwide participating in the Federal Depository Library Program, and its secure online bookstore.

Source: U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO)

bepress to Preserve Digital Commons Ejournals With Portico

Nonprofit electronic archiving service provider Portico announced that bepress entered into an agreement with Portico to preserve ejournals hosted on bepress Digital Commons publishing repositories. The journals are all participants in the new Digital Commons Publishing Services program, which is designed to give library published journals access to professional publishing infrastructure.

The initial addition to Portico’s archives includes 19 journals published by 10 different university libraries and other academic organizations: AcademyHealth, Butler University, Grand Valley State University, Kennesaw State University, Pacific University, Purdue University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Western Kentucky University, and the Global Summitry Project at the University of Toronto.

“We are pleased to be working with bepress, and to further extend our relationship with libraries through this partnership,” said Kate Wittenberg, managing director of Portico.

Founded by professors in 1999, bepress exists to serve academia. Bepress delivers scholarly communications and publishing services for academic institutions, empowering their communities to showcase and share their works.

Source: Portico

Summon to Index French Open Access Works

Serials Solutions, a ProQuest business, announced that Le Cléo, le centre pour l'édition électronique ouverte (The Centre for Open Electronic Publishing) is working with the company to have its scientific research content indexed in the Summon service. Founded by French research and academic institutions, Le Cléo publishes thousands of scientific works with a focus on social sciences and the humanities.

The following content will be indexed in the Summon service:

Revues.org is a web platform for journals and book collections in the humanities and social sciences and currently consists of more than 380 academic journals in French as well as other languages.

Calendapublishes dates for conferences, seminars, calls for papers, and other announcements that are of interest to the scientific community in France and other countries. To date, it has documented more than 20,000 events in the humanities and social sciences, with a dedicated scientific council sets standards for the scope and significance of the scientific news that is covered.

Hypotheses.org is a publication platform for academic blogs that enables researchers to provide real-time updates of their research efforts with more than 550 separate blogs currently available.

By making content available in multiple languages, Le Cléo’s platforms have developed an international reputation and are widely visited by non-French speakers. Inclusion in the Summon service allows libraries to easily add these resources to their collection for use by their researchers.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) announced the release of a beta draft for comments of the "ResourceSync Framework Specification" for the web detailing various capabilities that a server can implement to allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with its evolving resources. Feedback to this version of the specification is solicited and can be shared by March 15, 2013 on the ResourceSync Google Group. The ResourceSync joint project, funded with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and JISC, was initiated to develop a new open standard on the real-time synchronization of Web resources.

“Increasingly, large-scale digital collections are available from multiple hosting locations, are cached at multiple servers, and leveraged by several services,” explains Herbert Van de Sompel, Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory, OAI Executive, and co-chair of the ResourceSync Working Group. “Since Web resources are continually changing, this proliferation of content yields the challenging problem of keeping services that leverage a server’s evolving content synchronized in a timely and accurate manner. As we move from a Web of documents to a Web of data, synchronization becomes even more important: decisions made based on unsynchronized or incoherent scientific or economic data can have serious deleterious impact.”